slub: optimize bulk slowpath free by detached freelist
This change focus on improving the speed of object freeing in the
"slowpath" of kmem_cache_free_bulk.
The calls slab_free (fastpath) and __slab_free (slowpath) have been
extended with support for bulk free, which amortize the overhead of
the (locked) cmpxchg_double.
To use the new bulking feature, we build what I call a detached
freelist. The detached freelist takes advantage of three properties:
1) the free function call owns the object that is about to be freed,
thus writing into this memory is synchronization-free.
2) many freelist's can co-exist side-by-side in the same slab-page
each with a separate head pointer.
3) it is the visibility of the head pointer that needs synchronization.
Given these properties, the brilliant part is that the detached
freelist can be constructed without any need for synchronization. The
freelist is constructed directly in the page objects, without any
synchronization needed. The detached freelist is allocated on the
stack of the function call kmem_cache_free_bulk. Thus, the freelist
head pointer is not visible to other CPUs.
All objects in a SLUB freelist must belong to the same slab-page.
Thus, constructing the detached freelist is about matching objects
that belong to the same slab-page. The bulk free array is scanned is
a progressive manor with a limited look-ahead facility.
Kmem debug support is handled in call of slab_free().
Notice kmem_cache_free_bulk no longer need to disable IRQs. This
only slowed down single free bulk with approx 3 cycles.
Performance data:
Benchmarked[1] obj size 256 bytes on CPU i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz
SLUB fastpath single object quick reuse: 47 cycles(tsc) 11.931 ns
To get stable and comparable numbers, the kernel have been booted with
"slab_merge" (this also improve performance for larger bulk sizes).
Performance data, compared against fallback bulking:
Performance with normal SLUB merging is significantly slower for
larger bulking. This is believed to (primarily) be an effect of not
having to share the per-CPU data-structures, as tuning per-CPU size
can achieve similar performance.